My life story would be, at best, mildly entertaining. That's the only way to describe a movie about a semi-precocious young man with no coherent plot. And that's fine, I mean I've come to terms with the fact that Leo Dicaprio will never play out on the big screen the time I bombed my speech at my high school graduation or the time I crashed my boss's car (which are two of three things worth showing in my movie... the third is what I classify as "unmentionable"...)
But people like 50 Cent and Richard E. Grant do make movies about their lives, and some are very good and others (sorry 50) stink. Like garbage. Stinky rap-filled garbage. "Wah-Wah" on the other hand, written and directed by Grant (Grant's an actor best known for his role in the movie "The Player"), is one of those lives worth watching on the big screen.
Set in Swaziland in the late'60s, "Wah-Wah" follows the life of Ralph Compton (Nicholas Hoult) through his parent's tumultuous divorce. The opening scenes depict his mother (Miranda Richardson) engaging in illicit activity with her father's best friend in a car, with Ralph in the back seat, pretending to be asleep. Brutal. After his parents split, his father (Gabriel Byrne) sends him away to boarding school, becomes an alcoholic and marries a woman named Ruby, (Emily Watson) whom he's only known for a few weeks. But it becomes Ruby, an American flight attendant in who Ralph ultimately finds a friend and confidant, and who helps save Ralph, his father, and their family from destroying themselves. (After seeing the trailer and hearing the title, I was prepared for a light hearted romp, but what you get is something entirely different). The story inside the home is played out in parallel to Swaziland's pursuit of independence from the British Empire. The acting is tremendous on all fronts, with Emily Watson stealing scenes left and right, but it is truly a cast effort to keep the audience so thoroughly engaged.
Because this was Tribeca, Richard Grant spoke after the film, and answered some rather personal questions. It turns out the story is semi-autobiographical. Condensing his life over 10 years into 3 was necessary to keep up the pace of the film, Grant said, but that everything that occurred in the film happened to him in real life (which is crazy once you see the film, I mean the dad with the gun and you can't believe he's going to.... Oh wait... I'm creating a spoiler... I forgot to say spoiler alert... just see the movie and then we'll talk about it...).
The question I asked (and subsequently what turned out to be the best question I thought) was if Grant thought the title was deceptive? The title "Wah-Wah" originates from Ruby's description of the baby talk engaged in by club members who initially reject her due to her "uncivilized manner." Grant responded that at first people kept asking him if it was a kung-fu movie, but that really no one could come up with a better title to encompass the film. "So many movies sound like so many other movies," he said. "Wah-Wah sums up the ethos of the film." If I actually had to think of two words to describe my life, I might make something up too, instead of you know, the words "mildly entertaining".